Wednesday, 18 August 2010

If you follow @FuturLab on Twitter, you'll have seen these before. They went down well, so we thought it'd be nice to feature them here too. We'll post more once Coconut Dodge has launched in the US at the end of this month :)

Joris de Man, composer of the Killzone series of soundtracks features in Coconut Dodge credits for translating store text into Dutch :)

The coconut crack sound took two people a day and a half to get right, layering wood blocks, fabric scratches and water sloshes.

By far the most time consuming aspect of production was getting the font to work properly. It took three months to get right.

The silly story about pirates stashing treasure in the trees was made up in 5 mins when faced with writing store description text.

Tuesday, 10 August 2010

Whilst developing Coconut Dodge, I kept a close eye on the PlayStation Store to see where the bar was being set for minis games. It was exciting because I genuinely believed Coconut Dodge was a higher quality game in all respects than most games on there. Of course, Fieldrunners and Aero Racer were clearly awesome, but they were also ports of games already enjoying success on other platforms.

Coconut Dodge is an original IP exclusive to minis, and in that sense, I believed it was the best game I'd played on the platform.

That is until I played Arctic Adventures: Polar's Puzzles.

Three hours later I gave it a 5 star rating on PlayStation Store, and felt compelled to write this post.

It's the first minis game I've played (aside from Aero Racer, Fieldrunners and of course Coconut Dodge) that genuinely brings value and quality to the platform in my opinion.*

Hurray for Eiconic Games! The platform needs more developers like this to improve the reputation of minis.

Saturday, 7 August 2010

Hello, I'm Shaun. I've just finished a games design course at City College Brighton, and I have decided to take a year away from education and gain some experience in the games industry as a 3D artist. FuturLab have kindly let me work on their Coconut Dodge items for PlayStation Home. I am aiming to post my progress up each week :)

The first thing I worked on was the Golden Viking Helmet, which gives a player invincibility in Coconut Dodge. Over the past few days I have been learning the process for putting the models into Home. Each model needs three LODs (Levels of Detail), which you can see below.

As you can see, each LOD model needs to have less and less detail, which makes them look a bit blocky... The further away you are from the helmet the lower in detail it gets, so you should never have to see the blocky models.

The tricky part of this project is trying to get the same cartoony style as in the game. I would also like to mention that these probably aren't final until you see them in Home :)